In the native American art of carving wild birds in wood the techniques for achieving lifelike feather texture have been refined to the extent of marking the individual barbs or flue which branch from the quills of individual feathers. After the body of the bird has been shaped, the individual feathers outlined and the quill line defined, the wedge shaped tip on an electric pyrographic or woodburning electric iron similar to a small soldering iron is stroked away from the quill. The tip previously used is shaped like a wood turning skew blade with a triangular cross section forming a single somewhat sharp ridge extending at an angle to the axis of the iron to an outer point. Repeated strokes of the heated tip individually mark a series of barbs growing out of the quill. Because the iron is used for several carving effects variously shaped, interchangeable tips are provided with a hollow shank which slide fits over a heated rod extending from the handle of the iron. Typically the shank is longitudinally split so as to be contracted and sprung inwardly on the rod by an encircling spring clamp. The heated iron rod is usually composed of high carbon steel or copper which burn out after a relatively short life.
With small bird carvings it is desirable, for reproducing feather barbs life size, to mark the barbs at a spacing as close as forty or more lines per inch. The handful of American artists capable of manually achieving such a fine spacing must spend many hours marking the feathers of even a bird the small size of a chickadee. Although some unevenness in spacing is natural, generally the barbs should be parallel and equally spaced, particularly on the wings and back. Also the depth to which a feather is charred each side of a barb should be reasonably even or continuous from barb to barb along a quill.
It is impractically painstaking and time consuming to mark barbs of a bird feather at any spacing over ten barbs per inch with naturally appearing parallelism and depth of the barbs with the presently available pyrographic tip, and it is the object of the present invention to provide a pyrographic tip which will mark feather barbs on carved birds at fine spacings beyond human skill with prior tips, and with natural appearing regularity and parallelism and other improvements in appearance and reduction of working time.